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1 1 LIFTING THE RESOURCE CURSE FOLLOW THE MONEY A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues Revenue Watch Open Society Institute Center for Policy Studies at Central European University International Budget Project

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3 FOLLOW THE MONEY A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues

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5 1 LIFTING THE RESOURCE CURSE FOLLOW THE MONEY A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues by Jim Shultz Based on the shared experiences of international budget activists and groups monitoring extractive industry revenues at a workshop organized by the Revenue Watch program of the Open Society Institute, the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University, and the International Budget Project, in Budapest, April New York OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE

6 Copyright 2005 by the Open Society Institute. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Open Society Institute 400 West 59th Street New York, NY USA Distributed by Central European University Press Nador utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Website: 400 West 59th Street, New York, NY USA Tel: Fax: Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Shultz, Jim. Follow the money: a guide to monitoring budgets and oil and gas revenues / by Jim Shultz. p. cm. (Lifting the resource curse ; 1) Discussions from an April 2004 meeting in Budapest for international budget activists and groups monitoring extractive industry revenue acknowledgments p. ISBN Finance, Public Developing countries Congresses. 2. Transparency in government Developing countries Congresses. 3. Civil society Developing countries Congresses. 4. Petroleum industry and trade Government policy Developing countries Congresses. 5. Gas industry Government policy Developing countries Congresses. I. Open Society Institute. II. Title. III. Series. HJ2216.S '2 dc Design by Jeanne Criscola/Criscola Design Printed in Hungary by Createch, Ltd. Cover photograph by AP/Wide World Photos, Al Grillo

9 Foreword Many countries rich in natural resources squander their wealth, enriching a minority, while corruption and mismanagement leave the majority impoverished. Breaking that pattern is difficult. Because of their resource wealth, such countries do not have to borrow money from multilateral lending agencies that might insist on fiscal transparency and good budget practices. The world s leading democracies, dependent on importing oil, gas, and minerals, often have little appetite to use diplomatic pressure to demand better fiscal practices from resource-rich countries. And multinational energy companies, which depend on good relationships with host governments to allow them to continue extracting natural resources, are also unlikely to press for good economic management. Thus, a special responsibility falls on civil society in resource-rich countries. In this context, it becomes imperative for the people the true owners of their country s natural wealth to push their governments toward transparency and spending that responds to public needs. Yet such monitoring is not easy. Lack of information, the complexity of available data, and government repression all combine to leave most citizens of resource-rich countries in the dark about how much their government is earning and how it is spending that money. FOLLOW THE MONEY 7

10 Follow the Money: A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues aims to help citizens overcome these obstacles by providing practical information on how to be an effective monitor of government earnings and expenditures. It summarizes the experiences of some of the most successful budget groups in the world. Representatives of these groups came together at Central European University in April 2004 to discuss what it takes to succeed in monitoring how governments manage public money. The workshop in Budapest was organized by the Open Society Institute in partnership with the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University and the International Budget Project. Follow the Money is the first in a series of guides to be published by the Open Society Institute s Revenue Watch program targeting different audiences nongovernmental organizations, journalists, investors, and policymakers in an effort to help these stakeholders promote government transparency and accountability. Ultimately, by detailing and disseminating monitoring information and strategies, Follow the Money aims to help lift the resource curse that impedes the development of many impoverished countries. Svetlana Tsalik Director, Revenue Watch Open Society Institute Anthony Richter Associate Director Open Society Institute 8 FOLLOW THE MONEY

11 Acknowledgments Follow the Money is based on discussions from an April 2004 meeting in Budapest for international budget activists and groups monitoring extractive industry revenues. The meeting was convened by the Open Society Institute s Revenue Watch, the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University, and the International Budget Project. Jim Shultz, who participated in the meeting and wrote this report, is the executive director of The Democracy Center and author of The Democracy Owners Manual A Practical Guide to Changing the World (Rutgers University Press). Five people developed the idea for having a dialogue on monitoring budgets and extractive industry revenues: Svetlana Tsalik of the Open Society Institute s Revenue Watch program; Warren Krafchik and Jim St. George of the International Budget Project; and Violetta Zentai and Martin Tisné of the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University (CEU). They organized the meeting and contributed to the editing of Follow the Money. Sara Svensson, also of the Center for Policy Studies at CEU, worked on logistics for the meeting and provided support for this report. Substantial acknowledgment goes as well to the participants in the meeting, who are listed at the end of the report, for sharing their experiences and insights, which are reflected throughout these pages. FOLLOW THE MONEY 9

12 The Open Society Institute, a private operating and grantmaking foundation, aims to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. On a local level, OSI implements a range of initiatives to support the rule of law, education, public health, and independent media. At the same time, OSI works to build alliances across borders and continents on issues such as combating corruption and rights abuses. OSI s Revenue Watch sees the transparent use of revenues generated by the sale and transport of natural resources as an issue of great importance for regional development and the promotion of civil society. The program aims to generate and publicize research, information, and advocacy on how revenues are being invested and disbursed and how governments and extraction companies respond to civic demands for accountability. It also seeks to build the capacity of local groups to monitor government management of oil revenues and to ensure that existing and future natural resource revenues be invested and expended for the benefit of the public. The Center for Policy Studies is an academic unit within Central European University, dedicated to improving the quality of governance in the region by the provision of independent public policy analysis and advice. The center believes that the experiences of post-socialist transition can be usefully shared with countries enduring great social transformation, but that the translation of these local experiences requires a sound appreciation of policy contexts. It is committed to strengthening local capacity for critical policy analysis and pursuing research and publications that are interdisciplinary and carried out with partners in the global policy community, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The center works closely with institutes and researchers from Europe on a wide range of projects, offers a Master of Arts in Public Policy degree, provides an online library of policy research papers and documents, and, in partnership with the Open Society Institute, supports an annual fellowship program. The International Budget Project of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assists nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and researchers in their efforts both to analyze budget policies and to improve budget processes and institutions. The project is especially interested in assisting with applied research that is of use in ongoing policy debates and with research on the effects of budget policies on the poor. The overarching goal of the project is to make budget systems more responsive to the needs of society and, accordingly, to make these systems more transparent and accountable to the public. The project works primarily with researchers and NGOs in developing countries or new democracies. 10 FOLLOW THE MONEY

15 Executive Summary Public budgets are the instruments that governments use to set their priorities. Over the past decade an important global movement has emerged to give citizens and civil society a voice in budget issues. A key part of budget work is monitoring revenues from the extraction and sale of gas, oil, and minerals. In April 2004, the Open Society Institute, the International Budget Project, and the Center for Policy Studies at Central European University brought together civil society leaders working on these issues to determine how the best practices from budget work can be applied to the challenge of monitoring extractive industry revenues. This report summarizes their views and recommendations. The appendix provides a list of Internet resources for further reading and a glossary of terms related to budget monitoring and the extractive industry. Civil Society Budget Work An Overview The heart of civil society budget work is to engage and mobilize the public by showing how budget numbers relate to issues that affect people s daily lives from public health to education to wealth distribution. A special priority is assuring that public funds are used to meet the basic needs of society, especially the needs of the poor. There are six main forms that civil society budget work can take, often in various com- FOLLOW THE MONEY 13

16 binations: 1) simplifying and disseminating budget information; 2) identifying and setting priorities; 3) influencing revenue policies; 4) identifying trends and providing projections; 5) highlighting best practices; and 6) tracking revenues and expenditures. Civil society budget work starts from many different places anticorruption campaigns, human rights demands, monitoring debt relief, and from specific issues such as women s health and children s services. As groups choose the focus of their budget work, they will face important strategic questions: How will they balance analytic and advocacy work? Should they be a government ally or critic? Will they focus on long reports or shorter articles? Do they build analytic capacity in-house or do they contract out for it? This report provides some approaches and answers to these questions. Civil Society Work on Extractive Industry Revenues An Overview Significant research reveals the paradox that, instead of benefiting countries economies and political systems, extractive wealth is far more likely to have the opposite effect a phenomenon known as the resource curse. The negative effects of resource wealth include greater poverty, lower growth, and slower development, with resource-rich countries ranking near the bottom of most measures of human development. Another effect is corruption and weak democracy, with natural resource wealth becoming a powerful incentive for authoritarian rule. Resource wealth is also a clear contributor to violence and civil wars as the desire to control resources takes its most extreme form. What links resource wealth to such deep economic and political problems? Oil and gas development are capital-intensive industries that do not create significant employment. Countries that are resource-rich often become reliant on the revenues from those resources, which are subject to sudden downward price shocks. A large influx of foreign funds also puts upward pressure on a country s local currency, hurting markets for other local goods. Extracted resources like oil and gas are nonrenewable and eventually run out; when they do, revenues dry up as well. Lastly, resource revenue can cover up poor governance as short-term but plentiful revenues shield government from hard choices and efficient operation. Civil society groups working on extractive revenues are pursuing a number of important strategies for change. At the national level, groups are demanding transparency from their governments and from corporations involved in resource extraction. They are demanding that extractive industry revenues be directed toward long-term national investments. And they are demanding a direct role in the oversight 14 FOLLOW THE MONEY

17 of how these funds are received and spent. Civil society groups are also working to develop the public s ability to understand and influence these issues. At the international level, several important initiatives are promoting transparency and public participation on budget and extractive industry issues. The Publish What You Pay campaign calls for the mandatory disclosure of payments made by oil, gas, and mining companies to host governments. Global Witness takes aim at the link between natural resources and violent conflict and human rights abuses by releasing hard-hitting reports that spotlight the officials and interests that shape budgets and control natural resources. The Open Society Institute s Revenue Watch program produces research on the management of revenues in resource-rich countries and provides support to local budget watchdogs. Central and Eastern Europe Bankwatch, a network of NGOs from 12 countries, builds citizen awareness and participation around specific development projects, including oil and gas extraction. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, launched by the British government, seeks extractive revenue transparency by encouraging voluntary agreements between corporations and governments. Four Key Factors in Successful Budget and Revenue Work There is a growing consensus that successful civil society involvement in budget and resource extraction issues depends on four important factors: Analysis Solid analytic work is the foundation of almost all civil society action on budgets and revenues. Groups must first obtain needed information by demanding access to government reports and data and by developing other sources ranging from leaks by officials to research at the community level. Groups have to develop the capacity to analyze the information and determine what questions are the most important to answer in order to advance their policy goals. It is then critical to translate that analytic work into an understandable form for the public, the media, and policymakers and to disseminate it widely. Building and Maintaining Advocacy Coalitions Effective coalitions can add a good deal to advocacy work. They can strengthen an effort s political clout and link the technical side of budget work with grassroots understanding and participation. Generally, strong coalitions begin with a common goal and FOLLOW THE MONEY 15

18 leadership that can motivate groups to join and participate. Coalitions, as they take on longer-term issues, may also need to establish a structure that allows them to function without unnecessary debates over power and control. Effective Media Work Dealing strategically and competently with the media is a fundamental element of effective advocacy. Through the media, groups can build public awareness, break the government s monopoly on information, and influence the actions of public officials. Groups need to choose the forms of media print, radio, television, or the Internet that best meet their goals. They need to make their stories compelling and newsworthy and have a solid strategy for getting information to journalists. Also important is building ongoing relationships with journalists and increasing the media s own capacity for covering these issues. Groups should also consider disseminating their messages through their own newsletters, newspaper inserts, and other formats. Dealing with Public Officials The ultimate objective of civil society work is to engage public officials and push them in the direction of civil society s agenda. Civil society advocates have to pay attention to many parts of government all at once: leaders in the executive branch, mid-level technocrats, the legislative branch, auditors, local officials, and others. Groups have to consider how cooperative or adversarial to be with officials. They also need to determine what strategies they will use to engage officials, from informal information sharing to the creation of formal processes and structures for citizen participation. In the end, while there are some important distinctions between the two, budget work and extractive sector revenue work are not that different. Work on extractive sector revenue issues is an important part of budget work and will become even more so in the years ahead. By promoting public understanding and involvement in budgets and the revenues received from extractive industry, civil society is making public budgeting more effective while strengthening democracy. 16 FOLLOW THE MONEY

19 How much are governments in resource-rich countries earning from oil and gas operations and is it a fair share? How are these funds being spent and to what effect? I. Introduction Public budgets are the instruments that governments use to set their priorities to determine, for example, how much they will invest in maintaining public health, providing for public education, and alleviating poverty. Over the course of the past decade an important, global citizen movement has emerged to give citizens and civil society a voice in public budget issues through monitoring, analysis, and a host of advocacy activities. From these various efforts in rich and poor countries throughout the world, civil society groups have learned some important and invaluable lessons. What governments have to spend in their budgets depends on what governments take in through their tax and revenue systems. In many nations, especially poor ones, a key source for these public funds is the revenue generated from the extraction and sale of gas, oil, and minerals. Yet in many of those nations, government budgets receive only a small fraction of the revenue thus generated and the people receive little or no benefit from the country s natural wealth, which rightfully belongs to them. A key emerging area of budget work, therefore, is monitoring and advocacy regarding extractive industry revenue. Civil society groups are pursuing monitoring and advocacy by asking the following basic questions: How much are their governments earning from oil and gas operations and is it a fair share? FOLLOW THE MONEY 17

20 How are those funds being spent and to what effect? How can the public be more vigilant and participate more effectively in decisions on the collection and expenditure of these funds? New projects are underway on these issues, and monitoring extractive industry revenues will be an area of growing attention for budget groups in many nations. The April 2004 meeting in Budapest brought together key civil society leaders working on budget and extractive industry revenue issues. Participants from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, and the United States represented a range of experience in specific countries and internationally. Their objective was to identify the best practices from budget work that could be applied by civil society organizations to monitor how their governments are managing oil, gas, or mining revenues. Follow the Money, which is based on that April meeting, begins with an overview of civil society budget work what it is, why it is important, its main elements and strategies, and the factors that contribute to its success. The report then shifts to an overview of the economics and politics of extractive industries what is happening around the world, the main battles around mineral and petroleum extraction, and how organizations are responding to what is commonly called the resource curse, in which extractive wealth translates into both weaker economies and weaker democracies. The report then focuses on four key factors for success in budget and extractive industry revenue work: Analysis: What should civil society groups be studying and how? Organizing and Coalition Building: What are the potential alliances and joint efforts that can give work on these issues more political clout? Media and Public Education: How can groups working on budget and revenue issues move their information beyond the world of a handful of experts and more fully into the public eye? Dealing with Public Officials: How can civil society organizations working on these issues engage public officials to change and influence public policy? The report identifies key lessons to help guide others to be more effective in their advocacy work and concludes with summary reflections. 18 FOLLOW THE MONEY

21 The report also contains brief snapshots of budget and extractive industry work in action, drawn from larger case studies written by the Budapest meeting participants. These snapshots offer a glimpse into how groups around the world are tackling the challenge of inserting civil society and citizens into policy debates about how governments manage their money debates that are essential yet too often treated as private matters from which the public is excluded. The insights and lessons offered here synthesize ideas expressed by more than two dozen participants from across the globe. Together, our goal is to create a tool that citizens can use to help make their voices heard and their influence felt for greater justice and equity in the spending of public monies. FOLLOW THE MONEY 19

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23 Does the budgeted money actually arrive at the local school or clinic? What is it buying? At times people at the highest levels of government are as frustrated as local communities by the fact that they do not know what happens to funds after they are budgeted. JIM ST. GEORGE II. Civil Society Budget Work An Overview The opening challenge of civil society budget work, explained Jim St. George of the International Budget Project (IBP), is to take a fundamentally boring topic and make it interesting. For most people a budget is just a stack of pages crammed with numbers, unintelligible, uninteresting, and unimportant except to a handful of analysts and economists. However, behind the numbers are some of the most crucial issues that a community or a nation must address the quality of its schools, the availability of health care, income support, services for children and women, investment in infrastructure, assistance with housing, and many other public concerns. What Is Budget Work? The heart of civil society budget work is to translate numbers into issues and concerns that people care about, and to organize public action that can have an influence on policy. Most civil society budget work is also dedicated to the principle that the first priority of public spending is to match resources with needs. Many civil society budget FOLLOW THE MONEY 21

24 groups believe that the interests of low-income people are underrepresented in the budget process and make these concerns a top priority. According to St. George, budget work can be divided into six main categories, with most groups undertaking some combination of these activities: 1. Simplifying and Disseminating Information Budgets appear to be complicated collections of numbers. But if read carefully, they reveal basic policy choices. A key task of budget work is to translate this complexity into simplicity, to lay out the policy choices in a way that the public, the media, civil society groups, and policymakers can understand. Once the information is simplified, the aim of budget groups is to get it into people s hands. Groups in countries such as Peru, Croatia, Mexico, and Uganda actively provide budget trainings to civil society advocates, the media, and policymakers. They seek to open up opportunities for citizens and groups to participate more actively in the budget-making process. 2. Identifying and Setting Priorities Public budgets are primarily about allocating scarce resources. Even in the wealthiest nations, there is never enough money to meet all the demands on the budget. The main role of budget policymakers is to balance those demands, to decide what to support and what to reject. Civil society budget work illuminates the choices and helps citizens express their own views on which programs and needs ought to take priority. How important, for example, is public safety compared to making medicine available to poor children? St. George asked. 3. Influencing Revenue Policies The flip side of the choices that governments make about spending funds are the choices they make about raising revenue. This is an important new area for civil society budget work. Many groups and interests care about getting the government to spend money appropriately: better education, more health care, improved transportation, and so on. Far fewer concern themselves about how much money is raised and where that money comes from. At stake in debates over revenue policy are questions such as the following: How much should the government spend overall on implementing its macroeconomic policy? Is the tax system fair in terms of how the burden of taxes falls on the poor vs. the affluent? Are commercial interests such as the extractive industries paying their fair share? 22 FOLLOW THE MONEY

25 Should governments enter into debt to finance certain programs and, if so, how deeply? Budget groups are weighing in on these issues more substantively each year. 4. Identifying Trends and Providing Projections Budget groups often identify trends in spending over time for example, finding increases or decreases in education spending or the amount of government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). Similarly, budget groups provide useful projections that government either has not produced or does not want people to know about. They can project the long-term costs of spending programs or tax proposals. They can match demographic trends to government finances. In the mineral extraction field, budget groups can counter government plans based on assumptions that mineral resources will last forever by providing projections about how long revenue streams are really likely to last. 5. Highlighting Best Practices One of the things budget groups do in various countries is showcase what other countries do well as a way to prod their own governments, St. George said. This is particularly true around issues of transparency the types of information available and the ease of access but is also relevant for issues like AIDS funding or health care issues and eventually, we hope, tax policy. 6. Tracking Revenues and Expenditures Civil society budget work does not end with the numbers printed on a budget page, which say where government funds are supposed to go and in what amount. The ultimate questions are: Does that money actually arrive at the local school or the local clinic in the budgeted amounts? What is it buying? What effect is it actually having on people s lives? The answers to these questions interest not only communities and civil society groups but also government officials. At times people at the highest levels of government are as frustrated as local communities by the fact that they do not know what actually happens to funds after they are budgeted, St. George said. In Uganda, the Uganda Debt Network (UDN) has pioneered community-level monitoring of budget funds and expenditures. Other budget groups, such as IDASA in South Africa, are starting to develop methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of programs to answer the question: What are we actually getting for the money we spend? FOLLOW THE MONEY 23

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